Emotions bring purpose, pleasure and meaning to our lives. However, for many people, they are synonymous with distress, pain and suffering. Anger and rage can wreck relationships and cause problems at work; anxiety can prevent us from socialising or engaging in things we would like to; sadness can feel overwhelming and never ending. These types of difficulties are often referred to as emotion regulation problems, and can prevent us from developing stable and happy relationships, communicating our needs, and flourishing. This practical self-help book based on Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) will help you to take a new approach to managing difficult emotions. It outlines why we experience emotions, how they can be helpful but also how and why we can get in to struggles with them. It outlines the Compassionate Mind model, and guides you through a series of exercises that will help you to develop your compassion mind, and use this to develop more helpful emotion regulation strategies, and bring greater balance to your emotions.

Many of us have a tendency to measure our self-worth by comparing ourselves to others. But when we fail to reach our own, families, communities or societies 'ideals' this often results in feelings of inadequacy, anxiety and low mood. We may become self-critical, experience shame and a sense of being different from others. Although an improvement in 'self-esteem' is what we may feel we want this is not necessarily what we need. This is because self-esteem is often associated with times when things are going well but can fail us when things do not go to plan. In contrast self-confidence, built from self-compassion, can help us when things are going well and make us more resilient when things are difficult. This book uses the ideas and practices of Compassion Focused Therapy to help build self-confidence. Attention is also paid to difficulties that often come hand in hand with lack of self-confidence such as anxiety, depression, substance use and anger.

Leading depression authority Paul Gilbert presents The Compassionate Mind, a breakthrough book integrating evolutionary psychology, new insights from neuroscience, and mindfulness practice. This combination of techniques forms a new therapy called compassion focused therapy that can enhance readers' lives.

Emotions bring purpose, pleasure and meaning to our lives. However, for many people, they are synonymous with distress, pain and suffering. Anger and rage can wreck relationships and cause problems at work; anxiety can prevent us from socialising or engaging in things we would like to; sadness can feel overwhelming and never ending. These types of difficulties are often referred to as emotion regulation problems, and can prevent us from developing stable and happy relationships, communicating our needs, and flourishing. This practical self-help book based on Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) will help you to take a new approach to managing difficult emotions. It outlines why we experience emotions, how they can be helpful but also how and why we can get in to struggles with them. It outlines the Compassionate Mind model, and guides you through a series of exercises that will help you to develop your compassion mind, and use this to develop more helpful emotion regulation strategies, and bring greater balance to your emotions.

Although many people who have survived trauma, abuse, and violent situations understand on a logical level that the traumatic events they experienced were not their fault, shame may still underlie their feelings and fuel post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other trauma-related psychological difficulties. For example, women who are victims of domestic abuse are often so paralyzed with the stigma of shame associated with their abuse, they don’t seek help. The Compassionate-Mind Guide to Recovering from Trauma and PTSD helps readers reduce the sense of threat they constantly feel and develop a fuller understanding of their reactions to trauma by cultivating compassion for themselves and others. The practical exercises based in compassion-focused therapy (CFT) that are offered in this book help readers gradually confront and overcome trauma-related behaviors. This approach invites readers who have undergone a traumatic experience to develop compassion for themselves and others, a sense of safety, and the ability to self-soothe when difficult memories or emotions arise. Written by an international expert on PTSD treatment, this book will prove to be an essential resource for therapists specializing in the treatment of trauma and anyone in the process of healing from a traumatic experience.

Terrible events are very hard to deal with and those who go through a trauma often feel permanently changed by it. Grief, numbness, anger, anxiety and shame are all very common emotional reactions to traumatic incidents such as an accident or death of a loved one, and ongoing traumatic events such as domestic abuse. How we deal with the aftermath of trauma and our own emotional response can determine how quickly we are able to 'move on' and get back to 'normality' once more. An integral part of the recovery process is not only recognising and accepting how our lives may have been changed but also learning to deal with feelings of shame - an extremely common reaction to trauma. 'Recovering from Trauma' uses the groundbreaking Compassion Focused Therapy to help the reader to not only develop a fuller understanding of how we react to trauma, but also to deal with any feelings of shame and start to overcome any trauma-related difficulties.

There is good and increasing evidence that cultivating compassion for one's self and others can have a profound impact on our physiological, psychological and social processes. In contrast, concerns with inferiority, shame and self-criticism can have very negative impacts on these processes and are associated with poorer physical and mental health. The Compassionate Mind Workbook is for anyone who is interested in how compassion - in the form of ideas and practices derived from Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) and other approaches - may help us to engage with, understand and ultimately, try to alleviate suffering. CFT utilises both Buddhist practices and Western psychological science. It draws on neuroscience, insights into emotion regulation and identity formation, interpersonal psychology and a range of psychotherapeutic models. CFT-based interventions can help people with a range of mental health problems develop compassion for themselves, be open to the compassion of others and develop compassion for others. This workbook is a step-by-step guide to CFT, in which the chapters build your understanding of yourself, the skills that give rise to a compassionate mind, and ways to work with whatever difficulties you're struggling with in life. The exercises, prompts and case stories in this book provide an understandable and practical way to develop compassion.